“‘Modern prophets’?” Dane repeated. “Of what?”
“It appears to be of doom,” Sin Fen said, “since we are connected somehow to the gates.”
“A lot of prophets who heard voices have been burned at the stake,” Dane noted.
“And locked in mental institutions in more modern times,” Sin Fen said.
“What is on the other side?” Dane asked. “We’ve seen some of the creatures that come through, but never whoever or whatever is behind the intelligence- just the gold beam.”
“Don’t forget the blue beam that helped you,” Sin Fen said. “I think there is a war being fought on the other side and it’s spilling over into our world. Our scientists are still trying to figure what exactly the gates are.”
“So are the good guys on the other side the gods we hear?” Dane asked. “And maybe the bad guys are the devil?”
“That I don’t know,” Sin Fen said. “Maybe there are voices from the other side. Maybe it is our own subconscious picking up something that our conscious brains can’t.”
Dane wasn’t quite sure he believed her. “It has to be connected to these gates somehow. I was able to go into and come out of the Angkor gate when others were killed. I could sense more than others could- hell, I can sense things here in our world that others can’t. Have you ever been inside a gate?”
“Yes.”
“Angkor?”
Sin Fen nodded. “When I was young I accompanied a group of scavengers- people who raid ancient sites for the artifacts. They had heard the legend of Angkor Kol Ker and wanted to loot it. Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t coincidence that I ended up with that group. They searched me out. And I know now that Foreman was the one that gave them the information about Kol Ker- and me.
“The lure of treasure overcame our fear of monsters of legend.
“We went north where the stories had Kol Ker located. To the place where people feared to go. We crossed into what I now know is a gate area. Into the fog.” Her eyes had unfocused, staring at a point somewhere over Dane’s left shoulder. “All in my party were dead within five minutes. Monsters. Like you met. Beasts I had heard of only in legend and whispered stories late at night attacked us. And the gold beam of light. That too. And the blue. I barely escaped. I ran back the way I had come. Within a week of returning to PhnomPenh Foreman had contacted me.”
“He set your party up,” Dane said.
Sin Fen’s eyes refocused. “Yes. I know that now. I didn’t know that then.”
“He uses people to test his theories. To probe the gates. He used you. He used me and my special forces team. He used the Scorpion. How many people has he killed probing the gates?”
“I don’t know,” Sin Fen said.
Dane shook his head. “And we’re here, still doing what he wants.”
“It is war,” Sin Fen said. “In war there are casualties.”
“Do you really believe that?” Dane asked.
“You’re the ex-soldier,” Sin Fen said. “You must have believed it once.”
“I went to Vietnam because-” Dane stopped in mid-sentence. He had no desire to explain himself to Sin Fen.
“Foreman has his own demons,” Sin Fen said. “His parents died in Germany, in the camps. They sent the boys to live with relatives in the States in the late 30s but stayed in Germany to keep their business open, hoping that the country would go back to the way it had been. A foolish hope seen through the eye of history.”
“Foreman must have sensed the danger,” Dane said. “He must have felt guilty because they wouldn’t listen to him.”
Sin Fen shrugged. “He does not talk about it much. I only found this out when I checked his classified file at Langley.”
“You did not trust him either then,” Dane noted.
“No, I didn’t.”
Dane looked out the portal and he could see the real version of the picture on her laptop rapidly approaching. The derrick centered over the deck of the Global Explorer towered three hundred feet over the smooth ocean and ship. Over two football fields long and 116 feet wide at the beam, the ship dwarfed the two navy destroyers that slowly circled it.
“Do you trust Foreman now?” Dane asked.
“I trust that he will do all he can to battle the gates,” Sin Fen said.
“That doesn’t bode well for the footsoldiers in the trenches,” Dane said.
Chapter 4
The cold wind howled down from the rocky crags overlooking the fjord and cut into the flesh like a hundred spear-points hurled by screaming warriors. It chilled to the bone, no matter how many blankets and furs Ragnarok Bloodhand tucked around his body. It was not as bad as the wind of a thousand spear-points’ that he had experienced on the northern seas when the winds took the sea spray and froze it as it smashed over the bow of the longship, cutting into exposed skin as if the sea-god Aegir himself was telling them to go back.
But it was not the cold or the wind that had woken Ragnarok. He had slept through much worse. Indeed, he was known as something of an oddity among his crew because he slept not under one of the dozen large wooden benches that stretched across the width of the longship, but rather on top of the forward most bench, exposed to the elements. The ship was drawn up on the pebbled beach along the narrow strip of land that gave them access to the fjord and the sea beyond.
They had pulled in here before dark, not so much because of the coming night, but rather due to a dense fog that had suddenly appeared, enveloping the ship. Ragnarok and his men had traveled through fog before, but this one was unlike any they had ever encountered. It was very thick, allowing them to see barely twenty feet past the carved dragon prow. And it felt sickly on their skin, leaving a wetness unlike that of the ocean or fresh water. Even the color wasn’t right, not quite gray, but rather a yellowish haze with streaks of black in it.
This followed sighting a burning mountain earlier in the day to the east, a most bizarre occurrence that had rattled the crew. The volcano was atop a dark cloud that clung to the shore and mountain in a most unnatural way. The earth was unquiet, that had been clear for the past year as earthquakes and volcanoes all over the area of the world Ragnarok and his men traveled rumbled and burned.
At Ragnorak’s order they had carefully worked their way along the shore making constant soundings even though the ship drew less than three feet and finally turning into this fjord. The fog had faded slightly inside the fjord, but another very strange aspect was that it was not affected much by the fierce wind, something that had the crew muttering among themselves as they settled in for the night. It was unnatural and Ragnarok had posted a guard and had the boat pulled onto the shore to wait out the strange weather.
Awake now, Ragnarok didn’t jump up, rather he opened his eyes to tiny slits and peered about the boat, as his ears strained to hear something beyond the wind. It was dark, but he could still see a certain distance and there was no one on board other than his crew. He knew every piece of wood on the ship and he knew no one could move without him hearing the wood react. The rumble of assorted snores reached him, carried by the wind.
Satisfied he wasn’t in immediate danger, Ragnarok stood up, furs and blankets dropping from his body. He was an imposing figure, six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders upon which long black hair fell in dirty, uncombed curls. His face was square, with a formidable jaw. A thick red scar ran down the left side, from the temple, just in front of the ear, to end at the jaw. His eyes were startlingly blue, an inheritance from his mother. Unlike most Vikings, he did not have a beard, the hair on his face cut every week or so with a sharp knife, leaving a coarse black stubble peppering his face.